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Health Rant: Eye Floaters--So Annoying (and Also Weird, Once You Find Out What They Really Are!)

I had an annoying little speck floating in the corner of my vision all weekend--do you ever get one? It's the tiny little dot that moves when your eye moves, so you can never actually see what the heck it is. It seems like it could be easily explained as a piece of dust on the surface of your eye or something--but the truth is, it's much weirder.

But we're only seeing the shadows of the floaters; the actual floaters are inside our eyes, not on top of them.

This is all sounding a little bit terrible, to be honest--I don't love thinking about pieces of eyes detaching and floating around. But experts assure us that it's a normal part of aging; about 60 percent of people experience them by the age of 65 (although some people don't experience them at all).

And while they may be annoying (I kept trying to swat mine away--I thought it was a gnat!), doctors say the only real reason you should get checked out for floaters is if you suddenly have a huge number of them at once, or they're accompanied by flashing lights.